Government As Platform

Government as a
Platform
Tim O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media, Inc.
www.oreilly.com

June 4, 2009

Friday, June 5, 2009

Twitter hashtag for this event: #gplat

#gplat #gov20

How many of you have O’Reilly books?

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What We Really Do at O’Reilly

•Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge

•Amplify their effectiveness by spreading the
information needed for others to follow
them.

•Books, Conferences

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The smart phone plus local search.
Today pizza, tomorrow news?

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What might that entail?

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Gov 2.0

•Citizen contribution and collaboration
•Use of social media
•Transparency
•Lightweight web development practices
•Cloud computing

•Government as a platform

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Some Lessons from Successful
Technology Platforms

1. Embrace open standards: they encourage
innovation and grow the market

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The first IBM PC

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IBM’s original forecast for the PC

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Two Types of Platform
•One Ring to Rule Them All

•Small Pieces Loosely Joined

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Desktop Application
Stack

Proprietary Software
(Control by API)

System Assembled from
Standardized
Commodity Components

Hardware Lock In

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quot;The Law of Conservation
of Attractive Profitsquot;
quot;When attractive profits disappear at one stage
in the value chain because a product becomes
modular and commoditized, the opportunity to
earn attractive profits with proprietary products
will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.quot;

-- Clayton Christensen
Author of The Innovator's Solution
In Harvard Business Review, February 2004

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Internet Application
Stack

Data-driven Software
Lock In by Network Effects

Integration of Commodity
Components

Data Lock In

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2. Build a simple system - let it evolve

“A complex system that works is invariably
found to have evolved from a simple system
that worked. The inverse proposition also
appears to be true: A complex system
designed from scratch never works and cannot
be made to work. You have to start over,
beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall, in Systemantics:
How Systems Really Work and How They Fail

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TCP/IP vs. the OSI Model

quot;Over the long haul, most vendors are going
to migrate from TCP/IP to support layer 4,
the transport layer, of the OSI model. For the
short term, however, TCP/IP provides
organizations with enough functionality to
protect their existing equipment investment.
And over the long term, TCP/IP promises to
allow for easy migration to OSI.quot;
April 22, 1986 issue of Computer Decisions,
entitled quot;TCP/IP: Stairway to OSIquot; by Robert
A. Moskowitz

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TCP/IP vs. the OSI Model

quot;Over the long haul, most vendors are going
to migrate from TCP/IP to support layer 4,
the transport layer, of the OSI model. For the
short term, however, TCP/IP provides
organizations with enough functionality to
protect their existing equipment investment.
And over the long term, TCP/IP promises to
allow for easy migration to OSI.quot;
April 22, 1986 issue of Computer Decisions,
entitled quot;TCP/IP: Stairway to OSIquot; by Robert
A. Moskowitz

TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be
conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
- Jon Postel, in RFC 761 (later known as “The Robustness Principle”,
known elsewhere as “The Golden Rule”)

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Sounds like a government version of
the “Robustness Principle” to me!

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Components of the Platform

•IP - Internet Protocol
•TCP - Transmission Control Protocol
•DNS - Domain Name System
•HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol
•HTML - Data Format
•Demonstration client and server, both soon
outstripped by third party offerings

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Now more than 80 million web sites

Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/05/27/may_2009_web_server_survey.html

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Build a simple system, let it evolve?

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This one’s a bit of a challenge!

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This one’s a bit of a challenge!

•But, don’t forget! TCP/IP was a government
project.
First arpanet-imp log

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3. Design for participation

“The book is perhaps most valuable for
its exposition of the Unix philosophy of
small cooperating tools with
standardized inputs and outputs, a
philosophy that also shaped the end-to-
end philosophy of the Internet. It is this
philosophy, and the architecture based
on it, that has allowed open source
projects to be assembled into larger
systems such as Linux, without explicit
coordination between developers.”

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Anatomy of a Linux System

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The Domain Name System

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How did DHS Virtual Alabama Get
Participation from Agencies w/o control?

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4. Learn from your users, especially
ones who do what you don’t expect
•45% of all mashups are on Google Maps, only
4% on Microsoft Virtual Earth, 3% Yahoo!
Maps

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housingmaps.com - the very first
Google maps mashup
•It was a “hack.” Google learned from it,
quickly, and turned it into a supported feature

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If you’re really building a platform,
your customers and partners build
new features before you do

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Twitter hashtags and news - both
hashtags and the real time search

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USAspending.gov

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5.Lower the Barriers to Experimentation

Gene Kranz: Failure is not an option

But for most projects this is not the case!

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“I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully
eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and
combinations which wouldn’t work.”
Thomas Edison

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Breaking the Failure Cycle

Frank DiGiammarino: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12699091/Breaking-the-Failure-Cycle

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6. Build a culture of measurement

•If it works, do more of it.
•If it doesn’t, stop doing it.
•Build systems that respond automatically to
user stimuli.

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7.Celebrate Your Developers

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Remember: It’s no longer just about
web sites! Think web/data services

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YouTube embed code

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Don’t reinvent the wheel:
Some platform tools you can use
•Mediawiki
•Drupal, Wordpress
•YouTube, slideshare, scribd
•Google maps/Google earth
•Google moderator
•Facebook, Ning, Twitter
•Amazon Web Services
•Google AppEngine
•Force.com

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Government is a vehicle for collective
action
•Frank DiGiammarino, recovery.gov:

–Convener first, problem solver second
–Pull the right people together
–Enable action through knowledge, resources
and visibility

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Create more value than you capture

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The Digital Commonwealth

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Government As Platform

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